Hello and thank you for visiting AikiWeb, the
world's most active online Aikido community! This site is home to
over 22,000 aikido practitioners from around the world and covers a
wide range of aikido topics including techniques, philosophy, history,
humor, beginner issues, the marketplace, and more.

If you wish to join in the discussions or use the other advanced
features available, you will need to register first. Registration is
absolutely free and takes only a few minutes to complete so sign up today!

Not sure how many aikido people are Douglas Adams fans - used to be lots - but I recently heard an explanation of where Adams's use of 42 as "the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" may have come from...

42 is the decimal ASCII code for the asterisk (*) symbol.

The asterisk, is used to represent "whatever you want" or "anything".

So the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is - whatever you want ...

Adams had a lot of hidden references to religion, society, government, bureaucracy, and other things - some not so hidden.

Not sure how many aikido people are Douglas Adams fans - used to be lots - but I recently heard an explanation of where Adams's use of 42 as "the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" may have come from...

42 is the decimal ASCII code for the asterisk (*) symbol.

The asterisk, is used to represent "whatever you want" or "anything".

So the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is - whatever you want ...

Adams had a lot of hidden references to religion, society, government, bureaucracy, and other things - some not so hidden.

That actually would be ".*" - match anything any number of times, in regular expression speak.

That's true, and "any number of times" can also be "zero" in this case.

However, while an old standard, I don't think Regular Expressions would have been as well known or well used among computer nerds of Adams' era as the de-facto * and ? file matching patterns. Especially for nerds who were tinkerers rather than programmers.

"*" is anything that's not fractional or hidden, in regular expression speak. you need "*.*". if you are on unix/linux systems, running as root id, and execute "cd /; rm -rf *.*" would cause some interesting reaction from your boss, and his/her boss, and his/her boss boss,......

"*" is anything that's not fractional or hidden, in regular expression speak. you need "*.*". if you are on unix/linux systems, running as root id, and execute "cd /; rm -rf *.*" would cause some interesting reaction from your boss, and his/her boss, and his/her boss boss,......